Abstract:

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) officially declared a coronavirus pandemic. All over the world, face-to-face classes were suspended in order to slow down the spread of the pandemic. Concerning higher education, the closure of HEIs has naturally led to inevitable changes in teaching practices. In this context, this study analyses the higher education teachers’ perceptions of teaching and assessment practices, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A quantitative, transversal, and descriptive study was carried out to fulfil the objective of the study. A questionnaire was used as a data collection tool, comprising three main sections: sociodemographic characterization, remote learning strategies, remote assessment.

The study population were teachers of a Portuguese Higher Education Institution. A convenience sample of 550 participants was used, with a 95% confidence level and 3% margin of error. The sample was well balanced in terms of gender (47% male and 53% female). The mean age were 46 years, and 58% were full-time teachers and 42% were part-time teachers.

Our results show that there was a strong transposition of pedagogical practices from face-to-face teaching to remote teaching, with zoom being the platform most used by teachers to support synchronous online classes. Moodle has also been a widely used platform for sharing files, submit assignments, perform exams and implement asynchronous interactions with students.

Assessment seems to have been the highest challenge for teachers during the pandemic period. Our results show that teachers have used different strategies to assess learning, with essay, presentation, project and exam the most frequent. Regarding the positive and negative aspects of the remote assessment, teacher identified the ease of performing the assessment, and the increased autonomy to combine several kind of strategies as the most positive. The most negative aspects mentioned were issues related to fraud and identity control.

The study also allowed us to analyse teachers' perceptions taking into account their professional experience. The less experienced teachers have high levels of satisfaction with remote classes and remote assessment. On the other hand, the most experienced teachers used more tools during remote teaching period and used more strategies to perform remote assessment. These results seems to indicate that less experienced teachers have less expectations about the classes and the assessment, being more satisfied with the same results than more experienced teachers. Additionally, less experienced teachers might have less pedagogical training, more lack of information and devote less time to pedagogical issues than more experienced teachers, explaining the differences between the groups.

As final considerations, we highlight a set of recommendations for the future, namely, the need:
(i) to rethink e-learning, namely methodologies, strategies, or assessment;
(ii) to invest in software and pedagogical tools that are better suited to virtual environments;
(iii) to strengthen pedagogical training programs for higher education teachers;
(iv) to foster the creation of teaching and learning communities of practice integrating teachers with different levels of experience.

Keywords:

Remote learning, remote assessment, teachers, lessons learned.